The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on January 15, 2012, 02:23:03 am ---As I'm working through my past issues, I started a piece from July by Alec Wilkinson, about people who live in tiny (REALLY tiny) houses.
--- End quote ---
I remember that article, though, by now, not a lot of the details. I remember when I read it being concerned about bathroom space. ;D
I wouldn't mind living in a small space, though not too small. I have fond memories of the studio that was my first apartment in Philadelphia.
The only trouble is lack of space for my model trains. ... ;D
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on January 16, 2012, 08:18:23 pm ---The only trouble is lack of space for my model trains. ... ;D
--- End quote ---
Couldn't you run a track on the wall near the ceiling, at plate-rail level?
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on January 17, 2012, 12:19:56 am ---Couldn't you run a track on the wall near the ceiling, at plate-rail level?
--- End quote ---
From what I remember from reading the article, I'm not sure the "tiny houses" would even have room for that.
And my collection has grown way too large. ... :-\
Jeff Wrangler:
I just finished Peter Hessler's article in the Jan. 9 issue about the guy he grew up with in Missouri who has Marfan syndrome and is a crime reporter in Japan. I found it fascinating. In contrast to the way the yakuza are often portrayed on American TV, Hessler makes them sound almost ... quaint.
serious crayons:
I can't remember where I saw it, but somewhere I read that many New Yorker pieces start out, usually in the first sentence, by mentioning a specific date, or a month and year, or at least establishing a time frame of some sort. Since then, I've noticed how true that is. For example, here are the opening words from some of the articles in the Jan. 16 issue:
"Last week,"
"On a dark winter evening"
"In 2011,"
"On a rainy night in late November,"
"In the eighteen-sixties,"
"A few weeks after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak,"
And here are some from the Oct. 11 issue (I just grabbed these two issues at random from the pile on my nightstand):
"Since September 11, 2001,"
"The other day,"
"Over the course of the past four years,"
"When Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' came out, in 1987,"
"On a warm night during a trip to Beijing last month,"
"Two months before I was to leave Bombay for Toronto,"
"In 1980,"
"On April 20, 2010,"
"In the early nineties,"
"When Marvin Miller took over as the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, in 1966,"
"In Biafra in 1968,"
"Some years ago,"
Once you become aware of this pattern, it's both amazing and slightly tiresome. It's not just occasional -- literally almost all of the articles excluding the reviews and fiction start out with a time reference. I don't have, say, a Harper's or Atlantic handy for comparison, but I bet they don't do it as often.
Maybe it's a Remnick influence? I don't remember if this was the pattern back in the Brown or Shawn eras.
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